Measuring the perception and metacognition of time

The ability of humans to identify and reproduce short time intervals (in the region of a second) may be affected by many factors ranging from the gender and personality of the individual observer, through the attentional state, to the precise spatiotemporal structure of the stimulus. The relative roles of these very different factors are a challenge to describe and define; several methodological approaches have been used to achieve this to varying degrees of success. Here we describe and model the results of a paradigm affording not only a first-order measurement of the perceived duration of an interval but also a second-order metacognitive judgement of perceived time. This approach, we argue, expands the form of the data generally collected in duration-judgements and allows more detailed comparison of psychophysical behavior to the underlying theory. We also describe a hierarchical Bayesian measurement model that performs a quantitative analysis of the trial-by-trial data calculating the variability of the temporal estimates and the metacognitive judgments allowing direct comparison between an actual and an ideal observer. We fit the model to data collected for judgements of 750 ms (bisecting 1500 ms) and 1500 ms (bisecting 3000 ms) intervals across three stimulus modalities (visual, audio, and audiovisual). This enhanced form of data on a given interval judgement and the ability to track its progression on a trial-by-trial basis offers a way of looking at the different roles that subject-based, task-based and stimulus-based factors have on the perception of time.